Stephen King’s Neo-Western Flop With 15% Tomatometer Is Available on Netflix

Summary:

• Back in 2017, the movie adaptation of Stephen King ’s fantasy book series sparked a lot of public hate towards the approach it was done.
• Following the story of a modern cowboy saving the world, it loses a single drop of the source’s greatness.

Famous for writing numerous successful horror, sci-fi and drama novels, Stephen King gave the cinema industry lots of sources for adapting. While some of the adaptations of his works are considered cultish (see The Shining, Carrie, It), there are a number of clearly failed attempts to bring the accomplished writer’s plots to the big screen.

These include the adaptation of King’s magnum opus, a series of eight novels, which blends science fiction, fantasy, horror and Western. It was long considered unadaptable, until the 2017 movie was released, which partially proved those lasting doubts.

The movie’s plot revolves around Roland (played by Idris Elba), a gunslinger on his mission to protect the tower which supports all the world’s realities with his young apprentice Jake (Tom Taylor). Meanwhile, his quest gets disturbed by his lifetime rival, named The Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey).

It was intended to be the first installment of the franchise, based on King’s novels, however, the film already combined some elements from various books of the series and at the same time served as a sequel to it, but failed miserably at the release.

Receiving mostly negative reviews, this Western fantasy feature was panned for the poorly written compression of the multiple-novel source material into a 90-minute movie. Even the elaborately choreographed action sequences, remarkable visual style and quite convincing performances of the leading actors couldn’t save it.

King in his turn defended the movie, stating its creators “did a terrific job in taking a central part of the book and turning it into what I [King] thought was a pretty good movie". However, he criticized the decision to make it less violent for a PG-13 rating.

The master’s fans have obviously guessed that our topic is The Dark Tower, the 2017 adaptation which was rejected by both critics and the audience. Not only it didn’t manage to convey the wholesomeness of the book series, packed with dense plot, its mythology and perfect character development, but it also appeared to be merely bad.

“It's that the movie took a 7 book series and plucked characters, plot points and most of the heart out of it to deliver a 90 minute movie that feels more like a YA movie than a true adaptation,” fairly concludes Redditor @Buhos_En_Pantelones about this failure.

Nevertheless, it remains the only existing movie adaptation of The Dark Tower series and may serve as a guilty pleasure movie for an evening, which is available on Netflix .

Source: Vulture